The unbearable sweetness of being

The older Philip Roth gets - he is 73 - the more skillful, economical, perceptive and quietly daring his novels become. There is an irony in this, given the atmospherics of his amazing new novel, Everyman, which explores old age, infirmity, isolation and the inevitable yet always surprising fact of our personal extinction.We meet Roth's nameless protagonist (who is about the same age as Roth...